Do you feel your Instagram followers are just not growing or it’s happening really slowly? Want to speed up this growth?

The importance of great imagery is constantly increasing, so it’s not surprising that Facebook bought Instagram for over $1 billion in 2012.

They have 500 million monthly users according to the latest stats in June 2016.

Here are five tips and tools to help you to grow your presence on Instagram.

1. Improve the Management of Your Account with Iconosquare

Iconosquare is a web-based management tool for Instagram. It provides you with great analytics and also offers a faster way of interacting with a lot of Instagram shared content at the same time.

You can view your feed of Instagram photos and monitor and engage with any comments that come in. If you get a lot of comments, this is a quicker way of interacting and they have now introduced an app so you can also use it on your iPhone.

Searching hashtags and influencer’s is so easy. You can see who unfollows you and who are your loyal fans. You do need to upgrade to elite for this option.

There are also good analytics options available, which help you analyse whether your Instagram activity is working or not.

There is also a contest part to Iconosquare, which is a paid-for platform.

TIP: If you want to build your followers, you need to keep on top of your comments and also monitor your analytics to see what’s working and what’s not. Iconosquare helps with all these needs.

2. Use Mobile Apps to Dress up Your Imagery

On Instagram, you can apply filters to images to make them look better. Plus, you can also create text-based imagery or add text to photographs, which helps them stand out a lot.

There is a neat little mobile app called Wordswag where you can add text to your imagery.

Canva is always good if your not confident on Photoshop, its free to use and is easy to use. You can use this on desktop and mobile. You can create posts, banners, posters and even gift vouchers.

I personally have tried a few of them that help you layout your images and plan ahead to make sure your feed suits your brand, I highly recommend this if your looking for a beautiful Instagram feed.

Planoly is fantastic for uploading images from your desktop or your mobile. This is the one I use all the time, mainly cause I find it easy to use and you can edit and swap images around to suit what you want. You can also see what works and what doesn’t at a glance. And for the basic version it’s FREE! yay.

Tip: Consider apps that will help you create and modify imagery to capture your followers’ attention. Set up apps such as Wordswag, Planoly, which will help a lot. Also a great app VSCO you can change the photo’s lighting etc to match your feed.

3. Repost content from your community

It’s not all about your own content. It’s important to identify good content from your community and reshare it. Instagram doesn’t provide an easy way of doing this, but the Repost app does!

The repost app automatically adds attribution so that you correctly reference the original person who shared the content.

Sharing good content from the community means that people will be more likely to share some of your content in return. It also means you will find more great quality content for your own community to enjoy.

4. Learn From Your Competition

Klear is an excellent analytics tool that allows you to analyse Instagram accounts.

You can search for a potential competitor/key influencer based on skill, location or name. From the resulting list, pick out the relevant account and then select the tab to view their Instagram profile.

What you can do with Klear?

Overall analytics— How often is your competitor posting? What engagement they are getting, and from what type of posts?

Photos posted – What are the most popular type of photos posted by your competitor?

Your competitor’s network— You can see who is interacting the most with your competitor, and these are good people to start following and interacting with.

View analytics—When you see someone of interest, you can click on their profile and view analytics based on their account. You can also follow them on Instagram.

To get the best of this program you do need to pay to an upgrade which isn’t cheap.

TIP: Pick out your top competitors on Instagram and start analysing their account to see what works/doesn’t work. Test out some of what they are doing to see if it works for you.

5. Schedule Your Updates

It’s nice to do everything in real time, but it’s not always possible. You probably have followers all around the world and you may not always be available to send updates at the appropriate time. It’s good to preplan your content so your not rushing and just posting for the hell of it.

Iconosquare and Planoly are great tools to use to schedule posts. Make sure if you are scheduling you are still actively responding to comments and engaging with your community.

The most important factor in building your followers is to share great content that is relevant to your target audience.

If you want to build your presence more quickly, then consider some of the applications we have mentioned.

What are your tips for building your Instagram presence? What has worked for you? Would you use any of the tips above?